And while Tom Vilsak, the USDA Secretary of Agriculture, and Kathleen Merrigan, the Deputy Secretary, are busy talking up USDA support of farmers' markets, even getting their own FaceBook page, we should turn our gaze to a disturbing trend from which their song and dance is distracting us: the aggressive and wholesale outsourcing of the nation's produce supply.
America once fed the world, but now the world in increasingly feeding us, because transnational corporations find it cheaper to import fruits and vegetable than source them domestically. A government of the people wouldn't put its food sovereignty and food security at risk in this way, but transnational corporations have no problem engineering such a policy: It's good for their investment portfolio.
The local food and sustainable agriculture movements, as well as anyone interested in having a safe food supply, need to come to terms with the forces aligned against them before it's too late. In Congress the debate may be about making sure food coming from other countries meets "our safety standards, but that's deceptive. In their report to the Agribusiness Accountability Initiative at the Conference on Corporate Power in the Global Food System, the University of Missouri's William Heffernan and Mary Hendrickson write in "The Global Food System: A Research Agenda that "Most of the international trade and policy debate still focuses on countries as the major unit of analysis, assuming national governments are the major decision makers even as the dominant agrifood transnational corporations (TNCs) take a larger and larger role in the global food decision-making. Much of what passes as international decisions in the political realm are nothing more than intra-organizational decisions for TNCs. In an effort to process and distribute their products, agrifood TNCs transfer their products from one location to another, sometimes crossing borders. These intra-firm transfers become international acts and are called international trade. [31]
An eye-opening report filed by Food &Water Watch called "The Poisoned Fruit of American Trade Policy: Produce Imports Overwhelm American Farmers and Consumers provides us with the details: "As U.S. investments in overseas processed fruit and vegetable operations increased over the past decade, the share of imports that are essentially shipments between food company affiliates or subsidiaries increased. These are the different corporate divisions shipping ingredients or products to one another across national borders. For example, Del Monte Foods Company, which owns the Del Monte processed produce brand and the Contadina processed tomato brand, operates a food processing plant in Venezuela and two processing plants in Mexico as well as a fruit packing operation in Mexico. [32]
Food & Water Watch documents that "Between 2000 and 2007, the share of processed fruit and vegetable imports between these subsidiaries grew by more than a fifth, from 28.2 percent of processed produce imports in 2000 to 34.5 percent in 2007. About half of the processed fruit and vegetable imports from NAFTA partners Mexico and Canada between 2000 and 2007 were from corporate affiliates. This means that every other can of imported tomato paste or imported package of frozen sweet corn was manufactured at a US-owned factory in Mexico or Canada and shipped to the United States. These export platforms for the US companies have also emerged under trade deals with China and Chile. Imports of processed produce from corporate affiliates in China nearly quadrupled from 5.1 percent in 2000 to 20.4 percent in 2007. The share of inter-corporate processed produce imports from Chile rose 74 percent from 5.8 percent in 2000 to 10.1 percent in 2007. [32]
These realities are going to exert an unprecedented strain on US farmers of all sizes to compete with products produced more cheaply by the international affiliates of transnational corporations. It's essential that the public understand that "When NAFTA and the WTO went into effect in the mid 1990s, the majority of produce imports did enter during the winter. But now imports that compete with domestic crops enter the U.S. market year round. In 2006, the USDA reported, "Increasing fruit imports have been rising during the primary U.S. growing seasons. Trade proponents have often used the example of seasonal fresh grape imports to explain the complementary benefits of produce imports, but now even grapes are actively competing against domestic production during the U.S. harvest season. [33]
Despite the public demand for locally sourced food, the food safety legislation will create overwhelming obstacles to the local food movement's efforts to create the necessary supply chain infrastructure. Regular retail channels, which are tied into the global Big Food complex, will easily win out, leaving consumers with increasingly fewer sources of wholesome, non-industrial food products.
Those who want a safe and wholesome food supply would do well to listen to Joel Salatin, the farmer from Polyface Farm whom Michael Pollen profiled in An Omnivore's Dilemma. Testifying to the Domestic Policy Subcommittee on Oversight and Government Reform, Salatin said, "Folks, most of what we know as food regulations are not about safety, they are about denying market access to the local butcher, baker and candlestick maker by making regulatory overheads burdensome enough to eliminate embryonic competition from ever seeing the light of day. You cannot have a vibrant, community-based food system at the same time you legislate an anti-small, anti-entrepreneurial, overburdensome, capricious food regulatory system.
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